“Ansible is a clear leader in IT automation and DevOps, and helps Red Hat take a significant step forward in our goal of creating frictionless IT,” said Joe Fitzgerald, vice president of management at Red Hat. “Red Hat is transforming IT management, driving innovation that is 100 percent open source, built on an open management platform, and relentlessly focused on reducing cost and complexity through ease of use and automation. I am thrilled to welcome Ansible to Red Hat to help us expand that commitment.”

Ansible’s simple and agentless approach, unlike other solutions, does not require any special coding skills, removing some of the most significant barriers to automation across IT. By adding Ansible to its hybrid management portfolio, Red Hat will help customers to:

“We're thrilled that Red Hat, a global leader in open source, has chosen Ansible to tackle the future of IT automation and systems management,” said Said Ziouani, co-founder and CEO of Ansible. “This is a strong validation that Ansible's simplicity, enterprise customer base and robust community is winning in enterprise IT automation, from compute to networking to cloud to containers.”

The upstream Ansible project is one of the most popular open source automation projects on GitHub with an active and highly engaged community, encompassing nearly 1,200 contributors.

Ansible automation is being used by a growing number of Fortune 100 companies, powering large and complex private cloud environments, and the company has received several notable accolades, including a 2015 Bossie Award from Infoworld, recognizing the best open source datacenter and cloud software.

Executives from both companies will host a webcast next Thursday, Oct. 22, at 11 a.m. EDT to discuss this announcement, which will include a live question-and-answer session following executive remarks. To join the webcast or view the replay after the event, visit https://vts.inxpo.com/Launch/QReg.htm?ShowKey=27948 on Thursday.

The transaction is expected to close in October 2015, subject to customary closing conditions.